Modeling of compressive strength of self‐compacting rubberized concrete using machine learning

Abstract

This paper gives a comprehensive overview of the state‐of‐the‐art machine learning methods that can be used for estimating self‐compacting rubberized concrete (SCRC) compressive strength, including multilayered perceptron artificial neural network (MLP‐ANN), ensembles of MLP‐ANNs, regression tree ensembles (random forests, boosted and bagged regression trees), support vector regression (SVR) and Gaussian process regression (GPR). As a basis for the development of the forecast model, a database was obtained from an experimental study containing a total of 166 samples of SCRC. Ensembles of MLP‐ANNs showed the best performance in forecasting with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.81 MPa and Pearson’s linear correlation coefficient (R) of 0.96. The significantly simpler GPR model had almost the same accuracy criterion values as the most accurate model; furthermore, feature reduction is easy to combine with GPR using automatic relevance determination (ARD), leading to models with better performance and lower complexity.